Diamond Naga Siu is making her own major at NYU (it has something to do with journalism, policy, politics, business and sociology but she hasn't named it yet), and previously worked at Politico, Vice News and the Orange County Register.

Fintech leaders predict that 2018 will bring new highs for ethereum. (Source: Getty)

Diamond Naga Siu

Finder.com, a price comparison website, predicts that 2018 will be a big year for ethereum.

The site enlisted a panel of nine fintech leaders to analyse the top 12 cryptocurrencies — bitcoin, bitcoin cash, cardano, dogecoin, ethereum, EOS, IOTA, litecoin, mondero, NEO, ripple and stellar lumens — and predict their market caps, values per unit as well as other performance factors for the year.

They identified ethereum and stellar lumens as the two top cryptos to watch this year and even anticipate that ethereum’s market cap will grow more than bitcoin’s in 2018. But experts still think bitcoin will maintain the highest value per unit by 31 December — they speculated that it will reach nearly $30,000, while predicting that ethereum will hit $2,550.

Ethereum was priced at $885.43 last night with just over 98m in circulation, though the fintech leaders predicted that its amount in circulation will soar to more than 104m by the end of the year.

Jen Greyson, who was named one of the top eight women in crypto by Chipin.com, placed the highest ethereum price prediction of the nine fintech leaders at $6,000 and said she is still "very bullish" on the coin.

"We have our own challenges with the limitations of ethereum and can't use it to develop our final two tokens, but even that isn't changing my attitude about ethereum's future," Greyson said. "The platform is proven and I still think there is hope for the scalability challenges."

The site conducts this panel survey of fintech leaders’ crypto opinions monthly.